Monday, 27 April 2015

Why I’ll still be voting Green, despite their crazy copyright policy.

I don’t usually use this blog to make political statements, but as a Green Party supporter I’m concerned by the way the party has been criticised and attacked by many other authors and illustrators on blogs and social media in the last few days and wanted to show that not all authors and illustrators regard the Green Party as “morons”.

The furore is over the Green party’s current policies on copyright, as outlined on their policies website. The proposal that’s created the biggest fuss is the reduction of copyright to 14 years. Whether this is 14 years after creation or 14 years after the creator’s death is the subject of some disagreement. The proposal to legalise peer-to-peer sharing has attracted less outrage, but seems every bit as problematic.

As a full-time author whose living is dependent on copyright, I’m not going to attempt to defend these policies. I think they show a lack of understanding of how many people working in the creative industries actually earn a living and appear to be a triumph of ideology over common sense.

I’m not a Green Party member and, although I have voted for them in the past, I’ve only done so intermittently, partly because of impractical policies like these. However, like any political party, the Green Party’s policies are subject to constant revision and over the last few years, as the party has grown bigger, I've noticed that such unrealistic policies are increasingly being supplanted by more pragmatic, properly thought through alternatives. Some Green Party members, including the MP Caroline Lucas, appear to have got the message that their current copyright policy is unsuitable and this morning the party announced that that it will be reviewing the policy at its next conference. However, this will not be until after the general election, which may be too late for some of the authors and illustrators who have said that they were thinking of voting Green but, because of the copyright policy, will now be voting for another party.

I will still be voting Green. Copyright is important to me, but there are far more important issues at stake in this election. And if the election results in a hung parliament and the Greens gain enough seats to have some influence over government policy, I don’t believe that revising copyright will be one of their top priorities.

I think it’s reasonable to assume that one of the Greens’ top priorities will be addressing climate change. This is just as well as, while the Greens may currently be inept on copyright, the last 20 years of government has clearly demonstrated that the other UK parties are inept on tackling climate change. And climate change is THE single most important issue facing our generation. Hundreds of thousands of lives have already been lost as a result of our failure to address it effectively and things will get far worse if our politicians continue to downplay its importance. Here’s how environmental organisation Greenpeace outlines the enormity of the problem.

Glaciers, permafrost and sea ice are disappearing. Sea levels are rising, coral reefs dying, seasons changing and extreme weather events becoming more common. The impacts of climate change are already responsible for killing an estimated 315,000 people every year and damaging ecosystems. And this is just the beginning - the science predicts that anything more than 2°C rise in global temperatures puts us on the road to potentially catastrophic problems. There will be more flooding, more drought, more disease, more famine and more war, creating hundreds of millions of refugees and causing the destruction of entire ecosystems and species.

While issues such as the NHS, the economy, education or the benefits system are important, in 50 years time our failure to tackle any of these effectively will seem trivial in contrast to our failure to tackle the threats posed by climate change. If we don’t get our act together soon, future generations will wonder how our generation could be so astonishingly short-sighted and selfish.

Authors and illustrators tend to be relatively left-wing in their views, so I assume that most of those authors and illustrators who have decided to switch their vote away from the Greens are planning to vote Labour instead. Unfortunately the Green party’s crazy copyright policy is more than matched by some of Labour’s crazy policies on climate change, such as those relating to the aviation industry.

The Government’s denial of the urgent need to tackle climate-changing pollution from aviation is probably the greatest failure of all. According to the Sustainable Development Commission, the growth in emissions from air travel threatens to negate any reductions made on the ground.
Currently aviation emissions account for 11% of the UK total. Aviation emissions will account for 25% of the UK total by 2030 – this will rise to 33% by 2050. The Government’s decision to commit to airport expansion, against Royal Commission advice, demonstrates an utter lack of consistency with its commitments to tackling climate change and an inability to take the real steps needed to address the problem.

The Labour party leadership’s extraordinary naivety regarding the effects of aviation growth were highlighted in a 2007 interview with Tony Blair in which the then Prime Minister admitted that he would be reluctant to give up his frequent holidays abroad to help tackle climate change. Blair went on to say that encouraging people to holiday nearer to home was “impractical” and suggested that we ought to look at making air travel more energy efficient instead. A chorus of engineering and transport experts subsequently made it clear how "impractical" Blair's own suggestion was, explaining that even if energy efficient airliners were to be developed immediately, it would be 20 years before they had any impact on the industry. Only 5% of the world’s population have ever flown on an aeroplane. Effectively Blair was arguing that maintaining the lifestyle of a relatively affluent, privileged minority was more important than saving the planet for future generations.

Labour's policies on aviation are as ill-conceived as the Greens'
policies on copyright, but have far more damaging consequences.

Despite their deeply misguided stance on aviation and climate change, I don’t think the Labour Party are "morons". I think they have got their aviation and climate change policy badly wrong, just as I think that the Green Party have got their copyright policy badly wrong. However the consequences of Labour’s ineptness on climate change will be far more devastating, which is one of the reasons I will be voting Green rather than Labour next month.

Another reason I’ll be voting Green is that policy comparison websites such as Vote for Polices and Verto have told me that the Green Party’s policies across a wide range of areas are more in keeping with my own views than those of the other parties. I’m a supporter of the Fair Admissions campaign which aims to end religious discrimination of students and staff in UK state-funded schools. While the Greens and the Lib Dems support the campaign, Labour and the Tories do not, so this is another area where I think these other parties have got their policies badly wrong.

So that’s why – despite a crazy copyright policy that’s clearly not in my personal interests – I’ll still be voting Green. I hope that other authors and illustrators who are concerned about climate change will be able to see the bigger picture and consider doing the same.

3 comments:

It's the difficulty with single issue politics - however important we may consider a party's flagship issue to be, we may just end up blinding ourselves to a whole mess of other policies that have ended up getting grafted on by their allies.

I'd be (slightly) more impressed by the Greens if they took more of a global view of our ecological problems, eg Ms Bennett's comments here:

While the current Green manifesto may not be as thoroughly thought through as those of the three long-established parties, it’s getting significantly more comprehensive and coherent with each election and I don't think they can be dismissed as a single issue party in the way they could have been ten or twenty years ago.

As I said at the end of the post, many (not all) of their other policies are in keeping with my own views, but tackling climate change is a huge priority for me and the Greens are the only party whose policies reflect the scale and urgency of the problem. If nothing else, a significant increase in the Green vote would send a message to the other parties that the electorate want them to substantially ‘up their game’ as far as climate change is concerned.

About this Blog

Jonathan Emmett is the author of over sixty children’s books including 'Bringing Down the Moon', 'Someone Bigger', 'The Princess and the Pig' and 'The Santa Trap'. His work has been translated into over 30 different languages and has won several children’s book awards both in the UK and abroad.